Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 RC ... Today

The Release Candidate of Power Pack 1 will be available for public testing later today. As a quick reminder, Power Pack 1 is an update to Windows Home Server that provides a range of new enhancements, including:

Support for PCs running Vista x64

Backup of home server Shared folders

Additional features and better ease of use for remote access

Better energy efficiency

Improved performance

Support for the Chinese and Japanese languages (See the team blog for a quick overview of the introduction of the Chinese version of Home Server at Computex in Taiwan this week)

In addition to these features, Power Pack 1 also includes a fix for the data corruption bug that a few users have experienced. We are encouraging members of the Windows Home Server community to download and test the Release Candidate, in order to ensure the highest quality for the fix. Thorough testing and community feedback will determine the final release date.

@beaker
Well, from reading Ed Bott’s blog at zdnet, MS didn’t just “fix the bug,” they did a complete engineering review of the offending module. Fortunately, the fact that it only affected a small percentage of users allowed the time to fix it right.
From this I draw a few conclusions. First, the person leading this team has the “intestinal fortitude” to make the hard decision and see it through. I’m sure this person got a lot of grief for not “just fixing the bug.” Second, they put a lot of effort into the review, which leads me to believe that it is more important that just WHS. We already know that the new version of SBS borrows heavily on the WHS interface. It’s not hard to make the argument that this non-RAID file redundancy technology is also slated for SBS or future versions of Windows desktop.